Attachments get converted to instream code (Outloo

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This is happening so much more often lately: I receive an email that had an attachment, and it arrives with no header info filled in on the headers but all the header text displayed in the note and the full attachment is inline text in the note (so a jpg shows up as pages worth of computer code). It used to be that only mail sent directly to me had this happen, but if the mail was forwarded from one of my other accounts, it would be ok, but lately, even some of the forwarded mail behaves this way. Often but not always. For the forwarded ones, they’re always fine on the gmail or yahoo accounts where they were originally sent.

If I try to forward such an email, I’m able to put in header info but I’m sometimes unable to type in the body of any section of the note. Maybe just for the ones I receive directly. I just tried it on a forwarded one and was able to type into the body. I know I used to be able to delete most of the garbage, but on a couple recent ones, I couldn’t type, am not sure if I could have deleted what was there.

I don’t see where in Outlook 2000 I would set how the mail gets handled when it’s received. I’m interested to know if there’s something I could set, or something I could ask people to do when they send me mail with attachments. Thanks.

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This is not normal and suggests that the message encoding is getting corrupted so that Outlook cannot properly convert it back into its component parts. Aside from repairing Outlook (is “Detect and Repair” available on the Help menu in OL 2000?), consider any filters you use, such as spam filters, that could be causing this problem.

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Thanks for the reply. I don’t seem to have any rules set in Outlook. I ran the detect and repair, so now I’ll have to wait for some attachments to arrive to see if it fixed anything.

Maybe it also fixed Outlook’s inability to shut down completely (error message that it can’t close it on computer shutdown, reminders come up when Outlook is supposedly closed), but I did get the error message about not being able to close it when I just rebooted after doing the repair, so I’m not all that hopeful about that.

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Hi, I was thinking of external spam filters, such as the “proxy” filters supplied with many security suites. These usually rewrite your mail server information to something on your own PC in order to intercept the mail, so that is one way to determine whether you are running such a filter.

With respect to the other issue, many programs do interact with your mailbox, including PDA/SmartPhone sync programs and indexing programs (for “desktop search”). Can you think of any other applications to shut down that will let you shut down Outlook normally?

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I never would have thought of other applications. I closed Google Desktop and my ISP’s security service, then Outlook and then when I turned off the computer, it didn’t give me the message about not being able to close Outlook. I’ll see if I don’t have any reminders up in the morning. Now I can’t remember though if I don’t get those until I’ve opened Outlook after a reboot, so I may not be able to test it until I open Outlook, then close those things and then close Outlook but leave the computer up.

So I do have this security suite supplied by my ISP. You’re saying that it might be messing up the attachments? Is there some file I should be looking for to determine if I’m running the kind of filter you’re asking about? Should I be reporting the attachment issue to my ISP? I seem to have Norton AV running too – I can’t remember when my year is up but I’ll stop it at that point, but that could presumably compound the problem?

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Check the configuration of both the ISP supplied security suite & Norton A/V for anything to do with scanning e-mail. You could try disabling e-mail scanning. BTW, you should never have more than one real time anti-virus scanner running at the same time. That could be the problem. If your ISP supplied security suite has an anti-virus component you should disable it or Norton A/V.

Joe

--Joe

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